Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction

by Grady Hendrix

a superstrong scarecrow comes to kill, leaving “little broomstick footprints” in its wake.

Automatonophobia is the name smug people who’ve never been chased by witch marionettes give to the irrational fear of inanimate objects that resemble human beings: puppets, robots, mannequins, dolls. But can it be called an irrational fear if dolls can actually kill you? And are in fact eager to do so?

Clown marionettes are bad, but real clowns are worse. Since time immemorial, humankind’s greatest natural predator has been the clown.

Hating clowns is a waste of time because you’ll never loathe a clown as much as he loathes himself. But a magician? Magicians think they’re wise and witty, full of patter and panache, walking around like they don’t deserve to be shot in the back of the head and dumped in a lake. For all the grandeur of its self-regard, magic consists of nothing more than making a total stranger feel stupid. Worse, the magician usually dresses like a jackass.

Juice attends the meetings, showing the men her own pathetic, half-baked tricks, which they indulge because they’re too frail to hold a pillow over her face until she stops struggling.

The fact that the Sleights’ master plan to dispose of their dangerous enemy was to lock him in an unguarded trunk and shove it in the basement of the local college drama department gives you an indication of the masterminds we’re dealing with.

Because, as Abracadabra tells us, “Real magic is people.” And please note, “people” does not include magicians, witches, witch marionettes, clowns, clown dolls, or children. We’d all be a lot safer without any of them.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to 1984, the year Jack Chick published his infamous anti-RPG (role-playing game) tract Dark Dungeons, claiming that these dice-and-paper games were a gateway to satanism and suicide. But the moral lather that Chick and groups like B.A.D.D. (Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons) worked themselves into stemmed from a very real tragedy: the suicide of a child prodigy named James Dallas Egbert III.

Ironically, while Jaffe and Coyne posited RPGs as an escape from reality, they’re the ones running from the truth, fabricating a fear of games that hadn’t harmed anybody, based on false information about a missing person case. Who’s the hobgoblin now?

In one of the book’s most famous scenes, 148,820 people commit suicide by walking into the sea.

Herbert had revealed a great truth to aspiring horror novelists that would guide British horror books for the next twenty years: human beings are delicious, and England is full of them.

One way writers sought to make dogs scarier was to give them rabies.

In fact, it’s the humans who look like the sadistic monsters in Cats Gone Wild books, saying things like, “So, the plan is to wait for the cats to show themselves and then go at them with flame throwers.

the scrotum-ripping Taurus (1982), about Mexican bulls retired from the bullfighting circuit who get stoned on agave roots and go on a crime spree across Mexico, murdering women with their enormous penises, killing men by goring them in the crotch, and generally demonstrating that bulls are “the most virile animal the world has ever known.”

The Predators, in which a Kodiak bear and a great white shark battle each other on pay-per-view cable. Whichever one loses, the reader wins.

miscalculation. He has eaten Professor Cliff Davenport’s favorite nephew. Now it’s personal.

There is no moral. God is dead and life is a bleak, dark tunnel lined with hungry insects.

These characters’ inclination toward romance could be due to spending much of their time drunk in pubs. Always the first meeting place for farmers alarmed that their prize sheep have been eaten by something they’ve never encountered before, the pubs never seem to close, no matter how many slugs reduce the local citizenry to piles of grisly bones or how many snails drag their prey from bed

Marasco was a high school English teacher, so his illusions about human nature had long ago been stomped to death.

If social and political anxiety spawns zombies, then economic anxiety births haunted houses.

Marasco created the now-common real estate nightmare scenario: a cash-strapped family (or individual) gets a deal on a place above their socioeconomic station. Hoping to start fresh, they go all-in, quickly realizing that their attempt to buy a better life at a discount is the worst decision they ever made. Now all they can do is run, screaming for their lives, abandoning their investment.

Marasco was the first American writer to bring anxieties about class, mortgages, and equity to the forefront of the haunted-house novel.

disasters like Love Canal, the near-meltdown at Three Mile Island, and a series of high-profile asbestos lawsuits made clear that invisible evil was hiding in your home. In fact, if the cause was Satan, you were lucky. At least the Lord of Darkness wasn’t a carcinogen.

A 2013 documentary (My Amityville Horror) about Daniel Lutz, who was ten years old when his family moved in, puts a name to the Entity that haunted this house: George Lutz.

By his account, those 28 days at 112 Ocean Avenue left him with physical and mental damage from which it took years to recover.

In The Stepford Wives (1972), Ira Levin mocks the petrified patriarchy who fled the civil rights movement and feminism by retreating to elite Connecticut enclaves where they murder their unhappy wives and replace them with compliant fembots.

Tryon wondered if their new neighbors might not share the same values as these newcomers, if perhaps they were aligned with stronger, older, bloodier forces that the city folk had forgotten. So when his urban refugees land in the quaint village of Cornwall Coombe, they’re totally unprepared for the bloody fertility rites the tiny town requires to ensure a good harvest.

Joan Samson’s The Auctioneer is a hard and flinty book about a small farming community decimated by the city dwellers who move in and start buying up all the wagon wheels and handmade quilts, then the town’s small children, and finally its soul.

turns out the shaft was shut down because the miners had accidentally drilled into hell, unleashing forces of darkness that were defeated thanks only to a freak cave-in.

The real-life blackout of 1977 provides cover for half-human throwbacks to rampage up from the sewers in T. E. D. Klein’s novella “Children of the Kingdom,”

practitioner of Fritz Leiber’s style of urban horror,

Giving oneself over to Campbell’s writing feels a bit like losing one’s mind.

there’s one thing horror novels from the ’70s and ’80s can teach us, it’s that doctors in hospitals are mostly interested in impregnating patients with Swedish clones (Embryo), decapitating patients and using their heads to form a living computer (Heads, 1985), or harvesting putrid snot from the multiple anuses of alien worms with an insatiable appetite for human flesh (Fatal Beauty, 1990).

Suddenly, science was exciting—because scientists wanted you dead.

The Orpheus Process (1992), a book whose totally metal chapter titles (“Breakfast of Crucifixions,” “Deathwomb”) and studly hero, Dr. Orville Leonard Helmond (who had “managed to love and lay quite a number of pretty women”), can’t hide the fact that the good doc is a terrible scientist. He shoots monkeys with a .22, brings them back to life in his lab, and then either stabs them to death or takes them home to play with his kids. Depends on his mood.

Most of the science that appeared in these books was pseudoscience, to put it charitably. After all, the ’70s was the decade when finding a cure for cancer was abandoned in favor of finding the Loch Ness monster, searching for UFOs, researching ESP, and trying to establish a scientific basis for astrology. As we all know, the first three are valid areas of scientific inquiry; astrology is a bunch of bunk.

Cashing in on this trend was Lyle Kenyon Engle’s book mill, Book Creations. Based in Canaan, New York, Engel and his staff of twenty came up with a book concept, sold it to a publisher, and then hired a writer to churn out copy.

At least Ballantine made it through all twelve signs with their Zodiac Gothic series. Each installment began with popular newspaper astrologer Sydney Omarr doing the chart for the book’s heroine.

This sounds incredible, but apparently natural processes lie untapped inside our brains. As a doctor explains in Psychic Spawn (1987): “It’s very simple, Mr. Stern. What’s happened to you is that you have become psychic.”

Fortunately another holdover from ’70s science comes to the rescue: the Prophecies of Nostradamus.

So now that we’ve covered astrology and ESP, what about UFOs? Fake science, or the best science?

In 1977, the launch of Voyager and the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind kicked off a UFO wave.

every respected scientist came down on one of two sides: either aliens were coming to help us attain enlightenment or they wanted to eat us. Or kill us. Or kill us first and then eat us. There were conflicting theories.

Skeletons are the worst. They lurk inside our skin, waiting to jump out and use our computers, dance obscenely in graveyards, and wield enormous scythes. But even worse than a skeleton is a skeleton doctor. To be honest, I’m not even sure their licenses to practice medicine are legal.

The ’70s saw horror get serious, but the ’80s were party time. And the guest of honor at that party was Time magazine’s 1982 “Man of the Year,” fresh out of the lab and ready to rock and roll: the personal computer!

We learned our lessons only by trial and error. Trial: Why not let a fetus network its brain with the hospital mainframe? Error: Fetus becomes a big-headed psychic baby that wants to murder everyone (The Unborn 1980). Trial: Let’s teach monkeys to control robots with their minds. Error: God intervenes and makes everyone either crazy or dead (The Hacker 1989).

Gothic horror was domestic horror in which affairs of the heart were as important as affairs of the flesh. Its subject matter was families, marriage, houses, children, insanity, and secrets.

Like an unstoppable zombie, the literary career of V. C. Andrews cannot be destroyed. Put her in a wheelchair, throw her down the stairs, stick her in a coffin, it doesn’t matter. Because every year since 1979 there has been a new book on the stands from V. C. Andrews. Some years there have been six.

appalled by being portrayed as a victim. Andrews was nobody’s victim. At age 15, a fall down stairs at her high school exacerbated Andrews’s back problems. A series of failed interventions left her spine unable to bend and confined her to a wheelchair.

“So much protective secrecy in families; and so many skeletons in the closets.”